by Ted Hughes
darkenings
Teeming with wings and cries
Under toppling lumps of heaven.
She leaves him.
He half-lies in his chair and lets exhaustion take over.
His only effort now
Is pushing ahead and away the seconds, second after
second,
Now this second, patiently, and now this,
Safe seconds
In which he need do nothing, and decide nothing,
And in which nothing whatsoever can happen.
Garten
Killing time in the city, contemplating the window of a gunshop, sees through the reflection into interior gloom.
Major Hagen is lifting to the light the underbelly detail of one of a pair of collector’s pieces. Which he covets. He brandishes the gun, its lightness, with a sudden fury of expertise. Flings it up
To cover a fictive woodcock
Escaping from Garten’s hair
Into the free sky above the Cathedral.
Lumb’s eyes
Are locked
To an archaic stone carving, propped on his mantel,
above the fire.
The simply hacked-out face of a woman
Gazes back at Lumb
Between her raised, wide-splayed, artless knees
With a stricken expression.
Her square-cut, primitive fingers, beneath her buttocks
Are pulling herself wide open –
An entrance, an exit.
An arched target centre.
A mystery offering
Into which Lumb is lowering his drowse.
Ringdoves are ascending and descending
Between the rectory lawn and the rookery beeches.
And a thrush singing – slicing at everything
With its steely voice
Like a scalpel,
And thrush, lofty, calmer beyond thrush,
And ringdove mulling bluely beyond ringdove
Like treetops, blueing and blurring, stirring beyond
treetops.
Heavens opening higher beyond heavens
As the afternoon widens.
Garten
Strolls in the Cathedral
Among rustling tourists and scrambled whispers.
The nervy crowd is blocked.
Some ecclesiastical dignitary,
Mummified senile, bowed nearly double,
Like a Bishop being brought from his tomb
For an important convention,
Supported by two spidery clerics,
Processions shufflingly towards the exit,
Ritualises a whole aisle, his advance
Like an invalid’s first inches, his features
A healing, pinkish-purple wound, just
Relieved of its dressings and now airing
In the stained light. Garten stands back. All
Visitors stand back
As from the luckless singled-out casualty
Being nursed towards the ambulance.
Garten sits on a bench, watching the children feed pigeons and the toddlers chase them.
The uninterrupted sun presses Garten’s face. He unbuttons his shirt, feeling marginally reckless. The winter tensions ease in his skin. How simple, to vanish. To desert the whole campaign. The station is two hundred yards. Emerge in Australia.
A cloud-shadow chills the precincts. He fastens his shirt up.
The prints are ready.
Garten collects them without explanation. Tetley stares after him as he goes, as alarmed by that caught flash as one of his own birds.
Evans
Is welding the bar of a harrow.
Sizzling drops of glare fling out
Their wriggling smokes.
The shield-mask lifts away.
The red spot dulls. Evans sees
First Garten
Then the photograph.
He comes erect, waiting for the world to cool
Around the details.
He understands, without too much trouble –
As when he picked up the severed finger end
Under the metal cutter
That what has happened now has happened for good.
But he has escaped it already.
He has stepped that infinitesimal hair-breadth aside
From the point of impact.
He studies the photograph
Like a doubtful bill
Which already he does not intend to pay.
Evans drives. Garten, beside him, explains. Evans drives calm. Garten cannot believe that Evans is as amused as he looks. Garten’s voice goes on and on, like a bad conscience protecting itself, against the engine, against the pouring gardens.
Evans’ wife
Is ironing. She sees
Evans’ face in the doorway. Her heart
Leaps like a mouse, then hides.
The photograph
Appears, like a burn, on the shirt she is ironing.
Her husband cannot interpret
The foolish abandoned
Stupor of her look. She can hear him
Saying something.
Garten is surprised
By a cringe of pity.
Evans’ first blow crushes her lip, jolts her hair into a fine
dark veil,
And fixes her in the corner by the fireplace
With angled limbs. She rearranges her slight, small body
Tentatively erect. His questions
Are travelling too fast, and they are not stopping
For her to answer. His second blow
Carries her into the fireplace
From which he snatches her back, as if concerned,
As if to safety.
Now his arm rises and falls, and she bows beneath it.
Garten watches like one whose turn comes next,
Marvelling
At what a body can take.
She is sobbing.
She will tell everything.
Evans stops, without releasing her
From the pressure of his eyes
Smooths down his upcrested hair.
She huddles, small-shouldered, over the bleeding
That drips into her hands.
She starts to tell, coaxed by questions
Which are converted blows.
Her story makes its blurred way, through sobs and
tremblings.
Mr Lumb has a new religion.
He is starting Christianity all over again, right from the
start.
He has persuaded all the women in the parish.
Only women can belong to it.
They are all in it and he makes love to them all, all the
time.
Because a saviour
Is to be born in this village, and Mr Lumb is to be the
earthly father.
So all the women in the village
Must give him a child
Because nobody knows which one the saviour will be.
Evans and Garten forget everything, in a ravenous listening. Even after she has finished Evans continues to stare and question. It seems he might attack again. She tells and tells it again. She scrapes out the dregs of telling it.
It has nothing to do with loving the vicar.
She doesn’t love him.
Though poor Janet Estridge was infatuated with him and so is her sister and so is Pauline Hagen and Hilda Dunworth and Barbara Walsall and her and her and her and her, it’s true, all those are infatuated with him
But she doesn’t love him at all.
She doesn’t even like him. He frightens her.
She doesn’t know how she got into it, she only wishes she
was out of it.
He must have hypnotised her, she is sure he did.
Evans turns from the revelation
Radiant with incredulity
Like a bar of furnaced iron. He meets Garten’s eyes.
Garten has no chance to move.
; His brain moves, but his body is too late to catch up.
Then his long hair lashes upward,
His jawbone jars sideways,
The amazed loose face-flesh jerks at its roots.
His limbs scatter, like a bundle of loose rods.
He falls into a pit.
The pattern of the oilcloth returns slowly, magnified, and close to Garten’s eye. He feels its glossy cold on his cheek. He retains the snapshot picture of Evans’ fist in the air.
But Evans has disappeared. Mrs Evans is hurrying out, putting on her coat. She leaves the door wide.
Garten half-lies
Retching. He vomits
On to the oilcloth
Of the blacksmith’s kitchen.
Maud
Is doing something with a white pigeon.
It balances on her folded fingers, as she carries it into the
bare, bare-boarded room.
Maud’s face is closed
Like a new mother’s over her baby’s first suckling.
She kneels on the bare boards.
The pigeon flaps up, glide-flaps
Sinuously round the room, returns to the floor
Between her hands, wobblingly walks.
Its tilted head studies her, its pink eye. It blinks.
In the room above
Lumb’s head has sunk sideways.
He is not sleeping.
His eyes, fixed, seeing nothing, direct their non-gaze
By accident of his neck’s angle
Toward the carpet.
His lips loll idiot loose. His mask
Is loosened, as with ultimate exhaustion.
His fingers wince.
Maud, in her bare room below, has wrenched the pigeon’s
head off.
Her blood-smeared fingers are fluffed with white down.
Now her hooking thumbs break the bird open, like a
tightly-taped parcel.
Its wing-panics spin downy feathers over the dusty
boards.
She is muttering something.
Lumb’s mouth lumps with movement.
Sounds lump in his squeezed throat.
His lungs struggle, as under water.
His leg-muscles, his arms, jerk. His hands jerk.
Unconscious he tries to get up
As if a soul were trying to get out of a drowning body.
Garten
Stands at the door of Felicity’s cottage. The body and ripening hair of a dense honeysuckle bush the lintel. Over there, the rectory windows, among the Virginia creeper and behind high massed hollies, look ordinary.
Felicity’s face, in the gap of the door, offers nothing. She lets him come inside. Out of the observation of the village. In the cramped, coat-hung hallway, their whispers conflict.
Her grandfather, keeping his eyes on the television, shouts his enquiry. Garten bends a smile awkwardly on to his greeting, shouted back.
She wants him to go. She doesn’t want to talk any more.
It’s finished. No, it is not finished.
He is insistent. She is insistent.
The photograph
Is suddenly there. His weapon.
Behind her face, which registers no change,
Everything changes.
And Garten feels the freedom, for a moment, to take his bearings unforgettably on the stuffed fox-head, and the grandfather clock, touching quarter to four.
Then her glance frightens him.
Solemn
As a person
After the doctor’s terrible look, she
Puts on her coat.
Maud
Is standing naked.
She is sponging herself with the bunched rag of the
pigeon’s body.
She is painting her breasts,
Her throat and face, her thighs and belly,
With its blood.
Swaying her head, she continues to paint herself
Whispering more rapidly and sobbingly, more absorbed,
As if she were crazed,
As if she were doing something crazy
With the body of her own child.
Lumb’s head is pulsing pain.
He becomes aware, he tries to raise his hands to it
And to open his eyes,
And to get up.
He manages to glimpse flames.
He sees
A distant volcano.
It is not a volcano, but a hill.
He sees a church-shape, a silhouette Cathedral
On top of the hill.
He sees, with difficulty, a river of people
Flowing up the hill.
It is like a marching of ants.
It is a river of women
Flowing up the hill
To the Cathedral.
They are crushing in through the great West open doors
of the Cathedral.
Bodies cram the doorway, in pain,
In struggle,
Stricken and driven faces and reaching hands, seen with
difficulty.
In the fog of his vision
Which clears
To the dull tolling of a drum, a slow, convulsive pulsing
As if the whole stretch of sky were the drumskin.
Women black as flies
Like women mobbing for names
At some pithead disaster, mobbing to see bodies and
survivors, to hear the good news, the terrible.
They pile into the Cathedral, which is already packed,
Almost climbing over each other,
Pressing towards the high altar,
Raised faces, crying towards the altar, and arms lifted
towards it
Like swimmers from a wreck,
As if the Cathedral were sinking, with its encumbering
mass of despairing women‚
As if that altar were the only safety,
As if the only miracle for them all were there.
Their noise is a shrill million sea-bird thunder.
Felicity
Walks in the graveyard with Garten.
Among decayed bouquets, unsheltered stones, neglected
grass.
No, she does not want to examine the photograph more
closely.
Near a comfortless sycamore
Garten studies it.
He is a little tipsy with the power of his new role.
A cuckoo, too near, moves its doleful cry from tree to
tree,
On and on and on.
He tells her, as if he were splitting logs cleanly,
What he has seen today.
And what he is going to do with this evidence.
She snatches at it, to tear it.
He protects it. He mocks,
He lets her taste his exhilarated bitterness.
He shows her the picture, guardedly,
As if spotlighting her eyes with a mirror,
As if searching there
For some mark of mortification.
Her frustrated hands
Claw repeatedly.
Garten’s cheek whitens, roughened, an opened grid,
Then gleams blood.
Felicity is running toward the gate.
The Cathedral
Is rumbling, as if it moved slowly on its foundations.
It is humming the chord
Of all those cries‘ and the drum-pulse.
It is itself throbbing like an organ.
And the capacious cavern of it
The stalactite forest of walls and roof
Reverberates,
Magnifying their throats.
The tall altar candle-flames tremble
In the pulsing air.
Above them, above the altar,
Swathed in purple and gold,
Lumb
Looks down on to the tossing sea of faces,
The blighted and beseeching expressions,
The strangled eyes and grie
vous mouths,
Futile-seeming tendrils of fingers
That stretch their pleas towards him
Inaudibly
In the thunder of the one voice
Of all the voices
Beating like massed wings.
Throned beside him
An apparition, a radiance,
A tall blossoming bush of phosphorous
Maud has become beautiful.
He leans among the candle-blades towards her.
She raises her face to his.
The supplications intensify. The hammering voices
Make a walled deafness,
A peace like a cave under a waterfall
In which he kisses her mouth.
The drumming
Sharpens to a banging
And the cries
Harden like lament, like black disgorging smoke
reddening from the roots into oil-flame
Breaking in on the kiss,
And the candletongues
Lengthen leaping as if these new cries fed them,
And now thickening their flames with the flaming
Of her whiteness
And with the flames of his purple
As if these two were petroleum.
He embraces her. Their kiss deepens.
In a bush of flames they are burning.
The Cathedral
Oozes smoke from every orifice
Like a smouldering stack of rubbish.
Smoke bulges unrolling
From the shattered-out windows,
From the doorways.
Flames lance out, broaden and fork upwards
In rending sheets and tatters.
But the piling of women
Does not cease to spill into the interior,
Under the out-billowing smoke,
As if women were fuel